Tag: Celtic

It was front-page news on October 12th. A Daily Record investigation. “Celtic and the tax dodge firm,” screamed the headline. £434m in unpaid tax. Rangers Tax Case? Relative peanuts. Many Scottish football fans would consider the existence of a Record newspaper investigation into anything front-page news in itself. The Record played its full part in missing the Rangers liquidation story, the biggest in Scottish football history, as it unfolded in the years leading up to 2012. More recently, they ignored a damning report into Scottish football governance by the Tax Justice Network. And they are currently missing/ignoring the financial...

Last Friday on Glasgow Radio Clyde’s daily Superscoreboard (SSB) phone-in show, a simmering feud between two outspoken football pundits spectacularly boiled over. One was Chris Sutton, a “straight-talking” presence on the BBC’s Saturday afternoon Final Score (FS) programme and BT Sport’s Scottish football coverage. The other, Derek Johnstone, a “straight-talking” SSB presence and a Glasgow Evening Times newspaper columnist listed on professionals’ social network site LinkedIn as “TV Pundit, Glasgow Rangers.” Sutton scored 86 goals in 199 Celtic appearances from 2000 to 2006. His “straight-talking” shtick is wearisome. Not as wearisome as BBC colleague Alan Green’s whingeing controversialism, though...

“Over the past few years some people have said they haven’t missed the Old Firm game. Frankly they’ve been lying through their teeth,” gurned Sky Sports presenter David Tanner at half-time in last April’s Celtic/Rangers Scottish Cup semi-final. “F**k off, f**king calling me a liar. You don’t even f**king know me,” I said. And it was more insulting to fans of other Scottish clubs, who will have missed Celtic/Rangers as much as, say, fans of any London club “missed” the Manchester derby when pre-oil money Manchester City toured England’s second and third tiers. As Dundee United fan Stuart Milne...

Those insisting sport and politics shouldn’t mix are hopelessly naïve. Sport is too popular worldwide for it not to be used by those with well-tuned political senses. The fight against Apartheid was as much about South Africa’s sporting isolation as students declaring “until Barclays Bank disassociates itself from the Apartheid regime I shall take my overdraft elsewhere.” Of course, a few hundred protestors at a sporting event only impact significantly as part of a multi-faceted, on-going movement which picks their sporting event wisely. Protests at one rugby tour in 1969 didn’t bring down Apartheid. But it was part of...

On Wednesday night I was introduced, three times in four minutes, to the concept of “ear-splitting.” And what I thought was a metaphor for extremely high volume seemed very nearly real. When Celtic’s Moussa Dembele netted the stoppage-time penalty which advanced the Scottish champions to the final Champions League qualifying round, 52,000 people went various forms of nuts, loudly, all at once. They did so two minutes earlier, when Dembele tripped over FC Astana defender Igor Shitov seventeen yards from goal to win that penalty. And did so again, two minutes later, when the game finished. Celtic Park on...